n.a repository that holds records created or received by its parent institutionOverman 1959, 4Though the establishment of most of our institutional archives has taken place largely within the past 20 years, the beginning goes back much further.Deutrich 1961, 396The foremost of the Catholic institutional archives is that of the University of Notre Dame. Besides the archdiocesan archives mentioned above, it contains records of dioceses and other organizational records, a large number of personal papers of Catholic clergymen and laymen, and records relating to the university.Cook 1979, 147While these arguments have focussed most heavily upon federal government records, the conclusions may be applied to other records as well. They most clearly relate to other institutional archives charged with collecting the records of their parent bodies, and therefore most susceptible to the application of the principle of provenance. These archives include other levels of government (provincial, county, municipal), universities, churches, and large businesses.Ham 1984, 14They face a severe structural problem because institutional archives exist to serve the administrative and other needs of the parent body, not an amorphous group called researchers.Samuels 1986, 112An institutional archives’ responsibility is to gather and preserve the historic records of that institution.O’Toole 1987, 503Because these schools were themselves founded largely for religious motives—whether as upholders of Puritan orthodoxy like Harvard and Yale, as missionary enterprises like Dartmouth, or as outposts of heterodoxy like Brown—their own institutional archives contributed to religious history.Yakel 1989, 203The primary responsibility of an institutional archives is to collect, arrange, preserve, and facilitate the use of records of a parent organization. The authority for the archives, along with a majority of its funding, comes from the parent body. Although some materials in the archives may be donated from other sources, the core collection of records is that of the parent institution.Samuels 1991, 132While some institutional archives (because of legal or institutional constraints) confine their activities to the care of official records, other repositories do acquire non-official records for their archives or special collections.Cox 1992, 5–6Institutional archives possess a variety of important values for the institution and, indeed, all of society. Archives protect the legal rights of the institution as well as individuals. Institutional archives are used to protect the institution’s ownership of property. . . . ¶ Institutional archives are also essential to the administrative continuity of an organization.Ham et al. 1993, 724The archivist may be required, in effect, to take off the “archivist’s hat” and, for a time, to put on the “historian’s hat.” In such institutional archives—and these are a large and growing percentage of the profession—the historian’s ability to evaluate and verify records will be crucial for the archivist.Yakel and Bost 1994, 596The users of institutional archives range from local and professional historians to lower- and upper-level administrators. In many cases, administrators are the primary user population. Past archival studies, however, have focused on users with principally a historical purpose. The lack of research is surprising since most archival programs rely on their parent institutions for funding.Boles 2005, 44The distinguishing feature of an institutional archives is that the documentary focus is inward. The institutional archivist’s responsibility is not to document the world around the institution but rather the institution itself.Williams and Berilla 2015, 85An institutional archives is a permanent record of an organization; a memory bank that can be used for reference and historical research.Burns 2019, 664–665Within an archival context, a reflection on the structure and scholarship of this book reminds us that institutional archives often support predominantly white, colonial narratives, which, when presented without criticism, make for compelling stories about the genius of men.Leventhal, Collins, and Walsh 2021, 314When a building is part of a larger organization, then institutional archives may also hold records of uses and events in such buildings, perhaps lecture schedules or opening nights.
